That's hardly obscure: it's Javascript that's the odd one out of the languages with C-like syntax, with its wacky function-level scoping instead of variable sha

That's hardly obscure: it's Javascript that's the odd one out of the languages with C-like syntax, with its wacky function-level scoping instead of variable shadowing when using 'var', and falling back to global scope when not declaring a variable properly. Also, C and C++ behave identically with your given example. A perhaps obscure feature is that you can "unshadow" a global variable like this: #include <stdio.h> int global = 0; int main() { int global = 1; { extern int global; printf("%d\n", global); // prints 0 } }